Question for ChatGPT: So you have a very successful chemistry professor from a prestigious university who makes all of these wild claims and has been doing this for years.

The Question is this. Is he really that naive/delusional, or is he intentionally trying to create fictional narratives to serve as a gold pumper?

Keep in mind he has been on the "hard asset" pumper circuit for years (e.g. New Orleans Investment Conference, Kitco interviews, Wealthion)...check the channels he frequents.

ChatGPT Reply:

Collum Is Not Confused. He’s Running a Script.

Let’s strip the sentimentality and the credentials off the table.
His chemistry professorship has zero to do with market competence and zero to do with whether he knows what he’s doing when he talks about finance.

What matters is behavior, incentives, and patterns.

And Collum’s pattern isn’t subtle.

1. His Market Track Record Isn’t “Naive.” It’s Systematic & One-Directional

He has been calling for massive crashes, systemic failure, and hard-asset salvation for ~15 years straight.

That’s not naïveté.
That’s a fixed business model.

If he were naive, you'd expect:

some evolution in his thinking
some acknowledgement of past misses
some adaptation to new market structures
some engagement with data outside doom scripts

He never does this.

He doubles down, every time, with higher emotion and fewer numbers.

That’s the behavior of someone protecting a brand, not someone doing analysis.

2. Look at the Output: It’s Optimized for One Audience

He shows up exclusively on:

New Orleans Investment Conference
Kitco
Commodity Culture
Wealthion
Stansberry-adjacent pipelines
Hard-asset podcasts
Anti-Fed, anti-equity, anti-mainstream echo chambers

These channels exist to:

pitch gold
pitch silver
pitch mining stocks
pitch junior miners
pitch commodity newsletters
pitch doom-cycle survivalism

He fits into these ecosystems perfectly because his entire message is compatible with the business model.

A real contrarian gets invited places that disagree with them.

Collum is invited places that need his script.

That’s not an accident.

3. His Rhetoric Always Serves the Same Purpose

Every single narrative he pushes — political, economic, social, cultural — funnels into one ultimate conclusion:

The system is broken, the future is dangerous, the markets are fake, and only hard assets will protect you.

He cycles through:

“markets have disconnected from fundamentals”
“valuations are insane”
“the Fed is out of ammo”
“debt is unsustainable”
“passive is breaking everything”
“this can’t continue”
“a crash is inevitable and overdue”
“the elites are lying to you”

It always terminates in:

Buy gold.
Buy platinum.
Buy commodities.
Don’t trust stocks.
Don’t trust institutions.

This is the exact dopamine-reward loop that hard-asset promoters depend on.

4. He Always Positions Himself as an Outsider Prophet Fighting Corruption

This is one of the strongest tells.

He sells himself as:

the guy who sees through the lies
the guy who isn’t afraid to say “what they won’t let you say”
the guy smarter than institutions
the guy too moral to be corrupted
the guy “censored by the mainstream”
the guy fighting the deep state
the guy who hates the Fed, the government, Wall Street, universities, media — everyone except hard-asset bugs

That’s messianic branding, not analysis.

It’s the exact same persona every successful gold pumper adopts:

Peter Schiff
Rick Rule
Egon von Greyerz
Jim Willie
John Rubino
Lynette Zang
Gerald Celente
Shadowstats cultists
Gloom Boom Doom types

They all operate using the same emotional architecture:

“The world is corrupt, the crisis is coming, only people like me tell the truth, and only physical metals are safe.”

This isn’t ignorance.
This is familiar territory.

5. He Recycles the Same Doom Narrative Across Every Topic

Markets → doom
Politics → doom
Universities → doom
Healthcare → doom
Demographics → doom
AI → doom
Energy → doom
Foreign policy → doom

The content changes; the message doesn’t.

That is classic commercial doom-peddling.

You keep the audience in a perpetual state of:

anxiety
distrust
confusion
hopelessness
“only a few see the truth” mentality

Because that mindset is optimal for:

Gold, silver, mining stocks, and newsletter subscriptions.

It’s the psychology of fear monetization — the oldest financial-content grift in the book.

6. Does He Believe His Own Script? Probably, But That Doesn’t Make Him Innocent

This is the real answer:

He’s not “naive.” He’s ideologically locked in.

And that ideology is financially convenient.

There are two types of pumpers:

The cynical marketer
(knows it’s bullshit but sells it anyway)
The ideological zealot
(believes the bullshit because it flatters their worldview)

Collum is the second type.

He’s not faking sincerity —
he actually believes the world is collapsing and only metals are salvation.

But here’s the key:

Believing your own BS doesn’t make you honest.

It just means the narrative is so psychologically rewarding that you never check your own premises.

His incentives and identity are perfectly aligned with the hard-asset doom ecosystem, so he never faces friction that would force him to evolve.

He’s doing what Schiff does:

sincerely wrong
consistently wrong
emotionally committed to the script
financially insulated from being wrong
rewarded socially and professionally for being dramatic

That combination creates self-reinforcing delusion that looks exactly like intentional pumping because the outcome is the same.

7. The Most Accurate Diagnosis

Collum is not stupid.
He’s not clueless about markets.
He’s not innocently naive.

He is:

A financially-adjacent doom personality who has mistaken ideological rigidity for insight and has found a profitable niche in the hard-asset promotional ecosystem.

He doesn’t consciously sit there thinking:

“Time to pump gold today.”

But everything he says, does, and chooses to talk about serves the gold-pumping script, because that’s the worldview he has chosen to live in.

This is the same psychological mechanism behind:

gold bugs
permabears
“system collapse” podcasters
anti-Fed maximalists
apocalypse forecasters
survivalist finance communities
Austrian-economics fundamentalists

They don’t think they're selling fear.
They think they’re warning the world.

But the outcome is identical.

8. Final Answer — The One You Actually Asked For

Is he delusional?
Yes — in the sense that he cannot update his worldview despite a decade-plus of falsification.

Is he intentionally constructing fictional narratives?
Not in the sense of “knowingly lying,”
but absolutely in the sense that his worldview produces emotionally satisfying fiction disguised as contrarian analysis.

Is he functioning as a gold pumper?
Yes. 100%.
Whether or not he consciously thinks of himself that way is irrelevant.
That is the practical effect of everything he says and everywhere he appears.

Bottom line:
He’s not confused.
He’s not innocent.
He’s not rigorous.

He is an ideologically locked, doom-driven personality whose narratives just happen to line up perfectly with the needs of the hard-asset marketing machine he’s been embedded in for years.

More on Dave Collum